Black History is Our History

Rev. Peter A. Friedrichs

February 18, 2007

When I was in grade school I had two friends who were inseparable from each other. Greg Wong and Trent Bagley. Like most boys their age, Greg and Trent loved to play cops and robbers, to climb trees and to ride their bikes. Greg and Trent were friends of mine, but they were best friends to each other. Wherever one went, the other was sure to follow. What made them such an odd couple, if you will, was that Greg was Chinese-American and Trent was African-American, and they were living in the mostly-white town I grew up in. One day, I invited Greg and Trent to come over to my house after school to play. When we got off the bus, we went inside and I introduced them to my mother, who greeted them warmly. We went off to play and, after a while we made our way back to the kitchen for a snack. My mom was there to offer us some kind of goodie, and she graciously served us all. "Here you go, Trent" she said to Greg, my Asian friend. "It's so nice to meet you, Greg," she remarked to Trent, my black friend. Now, picture the scene for a moment, my two friends Trent and Greg, one black, one Chinese, standing side by side in our kitchen. With an innocence only a child can bear, Greg let my mom off the hook with this wonderful remark: "Don't worry about it, Mrs. Friedrichs. People get us confused all the time."

I grew up, as I said, in a mostly white town and I had what I call a "Leave it to Beaver" childhood. I had a hard-working dad who wore a suit and tie to work and who ran his own business, a "stay-at-home" mom who volunteered at the Junior League, planned family meals and was always there to greet me at the door when I got home from school. My friends and I were clean-cut, did our homework, and got into mischief but never into trouble, because trouble didn't exist in our seemingly ideal neighborhood. This fantasy was my apparent reality, the world I knew as a child. It was a world of backyard barbecues and playing "catch," summers at the lake, and Thanksgiving tables heaped with enough food to feed a small country. It was a world far removed from the hatred and violence that was boiling over in the segregated South of the Sixties and the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles.

My first lessons on race came when I was about twelve years old, which put it around 1967 or '68. My father, who owned a car dealership in the downtown area of the adjacent city, came home one day to report that a group of black teenagers, mostly students from a nearby high school, had gone on a rampage through his car lot, breaking off antennas, scraping keys along the cars to ruin their shiny paint jobs, and breaking a few windshields. Unfortunately, these incidents escalated and repeated themselves over the course of the summer, causing significant damage to my father's business. As a result, my impressionable adolescent mind came to associate young black men with violence, danger, and lawlessness.

But then, about five years later, I had an epiphany. A "conversion experience," if you will. At that time in my life I was intent upon becoming a doctor, and when I was 17 I spent the summer working at the local hospital as an orderly. One day, a family friend who was a doctor invited me to "scrub in" to watch him perform a hysterectomy. I entered the operating room and noticed that the patient was an African-American woman. As the surgeon stepped up to the table and received the scalpel I leaned in over his shoulder. I was tingling with excitement as I prepared to enter a world that contained my future, but I was totally unprepared for the profoundly transformative experience that awaited me. The doctor made his incision that separated the skin, and then he began to cut into the layer of fat to gain access into the woman's abdomen. It was at that moment that I noticed it: the layer of skin that contained the pigmented cells that identified this woman to all the world as "black" was as thin as a sheet of paper. Beneath this paper-thin layer, I realized, this woman was exactly identical to every other woman on the planet, be she black, white, Euro, Latin or Asian. I was transfixed by that layer of skin, and my whole world was changed. I realized the simple truth, both literal and figurative, that inside we're all the same.

Since my experience in that operating room more than thirty years ago, I've come to realize that questions of race are more complex than the simple biology that determines the color of one's skin. As Cornel West writes in his book Race Matters,"blackness has no meaning outside of a system of race-conscious people and practices… blackness is a political and ethical construct." As such a construct, race and racism is deeply embedded in the systems and institutions of our society. We no longer need masters to keep others enslaved. The political philosopher Iris

Marion Young tells us that racism and other forms of oppression, are:

As a member of the dominant culture, participating in a system that perpetuates norms, habits and symbols that separate us rather than unite us, I've come to realize that merely believing and acting like we're all the same inside is too simplistic and too easy. As Unitarian Universalists, we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We pride ourselves on being open and accepting. Individually, we attempt to overcome any bigotry or petty prejudices that we may have grown up with. We seek to be highly evolved, well-meaning, good-hearted people who desire and support justice, equity and compassion in human relations. But I'm afraid that, because racism is systemic, structural, and institutionalized in our culture, these personal moral strivings are not enough. Our personal commitments, expressed so eloquently in our Unitarian Universalist Principles, although important, are woefully lacking as a strategy to effect meaningful social change.

For years, I balked at the least little suggestion that I was a racist. For all the reasons and experiences I've described to you today - my good heart, my clear thoughts, my faithful intentions - I would bristle whenever someone would try to lump me in with the likes of David Dukes or George Wallace. Why should I, I thought to myself, be branded or attacked for the circumstances into which I was born? Why should I feel guilty for crimes I did not commit? Once we admit to the institutional nature of racism, once we see that it goes beyond the acts and beliefs of the individual, we are compelled to acknowledge our role, as well as our responsibility for its ongoing existence.

The first step, then, to appreciating the institutional nature of racism in America is to look at the privilege - the white privilege - that most of us here today share. In her 1988 essay entitled "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," Peggy McIntosh refers to white privilege as "an invisible package of unearned assets which we can count on cashing in each day, but about which we are 'meant' to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible, weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks." Consider for a moment the unearned privilege that we, as members of the dominant racial group, enjoy every day. We can readily associate with other people who look like us. We can turn on the television or open the newspaper and see people in positions of power with whom we readily identify. We can shop in a store without arousing suspicion. We can drive through a neighborhood of fancy homes without checking our rearview mirror to see if the police will pull us over. We can walk down a city street without causing someone approaching from the other direction to cross the street in fear.

I'm sure that each of us, if we take the time to examine our every day experiences, experiences that we hold to be normative, can come up with our own list. Whatever list you come up with, the important thing is to name what's in your knapsack and to take ownership of its contents. In naming our white privilege we lift the scales from our eyes and begin to see the shadow side of that privilege. Because for each thing we name and claim, we must recognize that the opposite applies to those who are not like us. Our unearned privilege confers damage and degradation, equally unearned, on those who do not share our skin color. At that point, if nothing else, we are forced to admit and confront our own discomforts. And that is the first step toward effecting meaningful change.

I would also like to point out another dark side to the system that confers unearned privilege upon whites in our society. Consider how those of us who enjoy that privilege are diminished by persistent and systemic racism. Consider how Martin Luther King, Jr.'s statement that "no one is free until everyone is free," applies not just to all people of color in our society, but to those who are white as well. If we are all truly related, if we are all part of the interdependent web of existence, then it stands to reason that I cannot realize my full humanity until all people realize their full humanity. In her book Dismantling Privilege, Mary Elizabeth Hobgood describes how members of the dominant culture suffer in a society that is divided by racism and other forms of oppression. She writes:

To put this in its simplest terms, in exchange for the privileges that we enjoy by being white, we have been burdened with blinders that disable us from experiencing the full richness of life that is all around us. Because we must spend our time and our energy keeping the systems and structures secure, we are unable to enjoy healthy relationships, and we have separated ourselves from the natural world. Think how our lives might be enriched, were we to appreciate and experience the full humanity of our other-colored brothers and sisters? What wondrous achievements could we all share, were we to allow full participation in our economic, social, judicial, and political systems? What could we learn from those whose experiences are so different from our own, whose knowledge flows in rivers separate from ours, rivers which run no less deep and no less wide than our own?

At first blush, this seems to be a somewhat selfish approach to racial reconciliation. We ask ourselves, "How will we be better off by dismantling the structures of our race-based system?" and thus find the motivation to do so. But I say to you, if this is what it takes, so be it. As long as we don't lose sight of the ultimate goal, as long as we don't allow ourselves to be distracted by our own plight, as long as we never forget that by any measure the harm we suffer is insignificant compared to the suffering the dominant class has imposed on generations upon generations of minorities, then let us claim our own moral, spiritual and psychological diminution, and seek its demise.

We're about mid-way through February, which for the past 30 years has been designated "Black History Month." Throughout this month we hear short biographical blurbs on television and the radio about the accomplishments of African-Americans throughout our nation's history. Charles Drew's contributions to medical science. George Washington Carver's discovery of more than 300 products using peanuts. Shirley Chisholm's contributions as a member of the US House of Representatives. Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in professional baseball. As I was shopping at the supermarket this week, a tape was playing on the store's sound system that was profiling Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the first African-American to graduate from medical school in 1883 and the first physician to perform open heart surgery.

The fact that Black History Month is still celebrated in America today, the fact that it still needs to be celebrated, is a shameful reminder of how far we have yet to go. While I applaud the contributions of the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, and all those Americans of African descent who have enriched our national experience, as long as Black History Month exists, so are we reminded that we are a nation divided. We must embrace black history as our history. And I don't mean just the "feel-good," white-washed history that is piped in as background music to our daily lives. I mean the black history of slavery, of lynchings, of separate but unequal. And I mean the black history that was lived out in the streets of Philadelphia last year, last week, and last night. A "history" where blacks are murdered at a rate that is six times the national average*, where fewer than fifty percent of students of color graduate from high school**, where the median income of black households is not even two-thirds of that of white households, and where the poverty rate for blacks is more than four times that of whites.*** This, too, is black history and this, too, is our history.

My friends, let there be no doubt that, despite our polite and sincere warmth toward the people of color that we invite into our kitchens and into our lives, racism remains a reality in our society today. Despite our best intentions and our deeply-felt commitments, the political, economic and social structures of our society confer upon whites substantial unearned privilege, privilege granted at the expense of all the Trent Bagleys and all the Greg Wongs. And let there also be no doubt that the road ahead is long and hard. But this is spiritual work, work that we, as people of faith, are called to undertake. The Unitarian Universalist Association calls this a journey, a Journey Toward Wholeness. To say that we want to move toward a greater sense of wholeness is to recognize there is a brokenness in our world, a brokenness that needs to be healed and transformed. Let us be agents of healing and transformation. Let us gather up our knapsacks and begin that journey together, a journey toward the vision of an "earth made fair, and all her people one."

Benediction and Extinguishing of the Chalice

* Christian Science Monitor 2/13/07
** Unfulfilled Promise: The Dimensions and Characteristics of Philadelphia's Dropout Crisis, 2002-2005
*** 2000 US Census, reported by diversitydata.org

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